Honoring the One Who Is Dying
An essay by Spike Humer
5 min readThere is a version of you that is dying.
Not metaphorically — though it will look like a metaphor to anyone watching. Actually dying. The way one season dies into another. The way a name you used to answer to stops belonging to you, and you keep turning when someone calls it, because some part of you is still listening on its behalf.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately — about how poorly we grieve the selves we leave behind.
We are taught to celebrate becoming. The arrival, the transformation, the new beginning. We have a whole vocabulary for the version of us being born.
But the one who is dying gets nothing. No funeral. No eulogy. No flowers laid at the threshold it carried us across. We are expected to step out of it like a coat we have outgrown, and never look back, never give thanks, never weep.
And I think that is part of why becoming hurts the way it does.
It is not only the unknown ahead. It is the unmourned behind.
Somewhere inside you is the one who got you here. The one who survived what ended. The one who held what needed holding. The one who kept the faith that no longer fits, who loved the people who could not stay, who believed the things you no longer believe. That one is the reason you are standing where you are standing.
And now you are leaving.
You do not have to leave cruelly.
This is what I want to say.
You can turn back, in the quiet of an ordinary morning, and look. You can name what was carried. You can say: I see what you did. I see what it cost. I see how long you held this for me, before I was ready to take it up.
You can give thanks.
You can let go without contempt — without reframing who you were as embarrassing, as naïve, as someone you would be ashamed to be seen with. That self was not a stranger. That self was you, and was you for a long time, and did the best it could with what it knew.
And then — gently, the way you would close the door of a room where someone is finally sleeping after a long illness — you can let it rest.
This is the work no one tells you about. The work underneath the becoming.
Because the next version of you cannot fully arrive while the last one is still standing in the doorway, waiting to be acknowledged. It will keep tugging at your sleeve. It will keep appearing in your dreams. It will keep making you feel guilty for changing, or homesick for who you used to be, or strangely angry at the people who only knew you then.
It is not haunting you. It is asking to be honored.
So if you are in a season of becoming — between selves, between names, between lives — you might turn, once, and speak to the one who is dying. Not as a task. As a courtesy. You might say what was done well. You might say what you are carrying forward, and what you are setting down, and why. You might say thank you. You might say goodbye.
You are not betraying anyone by becoming. You are completing something. You are letting a sentence finish that was started long before you knew where it was going.
And then — when the one behind you is honored, when the room is quiet — you can turn toward the one being born.
Not yet arrived.
Not in a hurry.
Waiting, the way morning waits, for you to be ready.
—sh